It's hard to think spring is around the corner when we had two snow days here in Michigan last week, but it's warming up a bit, the
crocus are foolishly popped up their green heads and we switch our clocks next weekend. Spring is a time for change of course, and there are a lot of changes headed our way over the next year here at UM. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about how we teach costume design. Everyone I know really only learned it one way so that's the default for how we teach it and I'm just not sure that model continues to work well into the 21st century.
The date alone is somewhat baffling to me. From a social and cultural perspective I am well aware of how much changed from say, 1900 to 1920. Now, living through it, I'm trying reconcile how much has changed from 2000 to 2020. Just as much? More? I think I still own clothes I bought twenty years ago. Is the rise of the automobile as significant as the rise of the mobile technology?
My dear colleague, Jessica Hahn, is retiring this April and so we are in the middle of conducting a faculty search. Part of that search process has been to identify how and what we teach in an undergraduate program. As I interacted with each of the candidates last month, I was invigorated by the potential collaboration of teaching in a new way. It's a little scary, the unknown, but this generation of students is keeping us on our toes- desiring course content to better reflect more diverse perspectives (duh), including self-care and mental health in the conversation (what a concept), using technology to enhance teaching (we can learn all the things), examining the power structures that perpetuate toxic and sometimes abusive institutions (seriously, at every level), etc... I'd like to think I'm proactive about many of these topics, but it is A LOT.
I was having a conversation with a colleague the other day (stay tuned folks, we're trying to plan a day long workshop in NYC in May to unpack how we teach costume and fashion history), and she said something so elegant...maybe it was the Yalie in her :) Anyway, she described the three prongs of costume design- text analysis (including research), story telling, and skill or craft. I am sure at some point in my life I thought about how to discern those ideas distinctly, but it was certainly a good reminder as it's gotten muddy. I think there is a huge emphasis on portfolio ready paper (theoretical) projects and we've lost sight of the art of collaboration. How do you teach that? We can model it, and should, in our productions. So much collaborative work happens before and after the pretty costume rendering, but that classroom paper project is only catching a narrow slice of the whole job.
So one of my projects over our break is to raid Jessica's office! She's generously invited me to tag any books I might like to adopt as she cleans out her office. How lovely to sit and browse through books...
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